If you can put up with the extra weight, bulk, and complexity, you can add flashlights, sighting aids, and all sorts of stuff to your pistol. How to Make a Homemade Railgun: These are brief instructions on how to make a homemade railgun. For comparison, a regular military railgun can accelerate a projectile to speeds exceeding 13,000 mph in just 0.2 seconds — unlike the handheld railgun, which works at 560mph. Rail guns aren’t practical as handheld firearms quite yet — they’re generally quite large, unwieldy, and need to be recharged between each shot. Nope. Someone came by looking for “handheld railgun.” That depends, we may already have what was sought. A rail gun is a gun with another gun on the end - the projectile must be injected into the accelerator at transsonic speeds or it'll stick and be vaporized by the current. A railgun is a device, typically designed as a weapon, that uses electromagnetic force to launch high velocity projectiles. Projectiles fired from a rail gun small enough to be “handheld” would also be small enough (both in external dimensions and mass) to NOT be able to penetrate any decently armored vehicle. Rail guns require tremendous currents to fire projectiles at speeds of Mach 5 or higher. I'm pretty smart, and I already know it's beyond me. Many guns have some sort of accessory rail, or rails. Physics. What comes out of the barrel at that point is a white hot plasma - cool to look at but not useful as a ranged weapon. In the Navy's next-generation battleship, the all-electric DD(X), producing this kind of current will be possible. Below is the video of the gun test firing a graphite rod at an aluminum-backed plywood target, which Wirth speculates the bullet “probably just vaporized” before reaching the plywood. The projectile normally does not contain explosives, instead relying on the projectile's high speed and kinetic energy to inflict damage. Unlike a coilgun or gauss rifle which use a series of electromagnets to pull a magnetic projectile down a tube at great speeds, a railgun operates … This presents problems for a traditional battleship because power cannot be diverted from the ship's propulsion system.